Ibn Battuta Drops Anchor.
The legendary Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta arrives in late 1343 and is appointed Chief Judge for roughly nine months. His writings remain one of the richest medieval accounts of Maldivian life — cowrie shells as currency, royal banquets, and the quiet rhythm of island existence.
Ibn Battuta, the greatest traveller of the medieval world, set foot in the Maldives in late 1343 — late in his career, after he had already walked from Morocco to China. He had hoped to pass through unnoticed, but the reigning court, desperately short of formally trained Islamic jurists, discovered his credentials and pressed him into the role of Chief Qāḍī (Judge). He was married into the royal family to make sure he stayed.
He hated the job, and he loved the islands. He praised the smoked tuna, the coconut wine, the fourfold abundance of the trees. He recorded the workings of the cowrie economy, the royal court, the local naval organisation, the marriage customs, the architecture of the mosques — an ethnographic record of a 14th-century Indian Ocean state so rich that modern historians still mine it.
Two things appalled him. First, that respectable Maldivian women, despite being devout Muslims who went to the mosque daily, did not cover their upper bodies — a custom he tried and failed to legislate away. Second, that wives refused to eat in the presence of their husbands, so that he never once saw his own wife take a meal. He enforced Shariah strictly, quarrelled with the vizier of Sultana Khadijah, and eventually fled the islands when the political heat became too high.
He left behind four wives, a small stack of judicial rulings, and the most vivid written portrait of the medieval Maldives that survives.
The inhabitants of the Maldives are all Muslims, pious and upright. Their islands are very numerous, and their chief city is Mahal.
- Ibn Battuta, The Travels (Gibb translation, Hakluyt Society)